After four deadline extensions to force a sale of TikTok, the U.S. is finally close to a sale agreement for the massively popular video platform, a White House official said on Monday.
The deal will move TikTok’s ownership to a U.S. joint venture compliant with a 2024 law forcing ByteDance, Tiktok’s corporate owner, to sell the app or else face a ban in the U.S., a senior White House official said on a call with reporters, speaking on the condition of anonymity.
The official said the divestiture deal is on its way to be finalized and has been approved by the Chinese government. The deal will reduce ByteDance’s ownership to less than 20% as required by law. The official said they expect ByteDance to sign a “framework agreement” at some point this year.
So far, the only confirmed member of the U.S. joint venture is Oracle, whose co-founder Larry Ellison is a close ally of President Donald Trump. The U.S. company, which currently stores TikTok’s data on its servers, will be in charge of the underlying infrastructure of the app, including the algorithm and source code, the senior White House official said.
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Other investors are yet to be confirmed but will include American companies and global investors who already own stakes in ByteDance, the official said. The U.S. government will not hold any direct stake in the app’s new ownership structure, they said.
Trump is looking for other investors who are “patriotic” and “love America” to be part of this venture, the official said. The official said they expect the deal to be worth “many billions of dollars” once TikTok’s sale value is fully assessed.
But there are still some regulatory hurdles ahead. China has to issue an export license to allow the deal to go through, and the deal still needs to go through regulatory and antitrust reviews in the U.S.
Later this week, Trump is slated to sign an executive order extending a pause on the enforcement of the law banning TikTok on U.S. app stores for an additional 120 days and will confirm the deal’s compliance with national security requirements.
This announcement brings some closure to a months-long conflict between congressional Republicans and the White House that had become a barometer for Trump’s handling of foreign policy and Congress’ willingness to defer its authority to the president.
Last year, Congress passed a law that forced ByteDance to sell TikTok to an owner without ties to the Chinese government or else face a ban on users in the U.S. The law, which was passed by the Senate in a foreign aid package in April 2024, provided an initial 270-day period to agree to a deal and one 90-day extension to finalize a sale.
But by early 2025, a sale deal was nowhere close to being reached. The initial negotiation period was set to expire on Jan. 19 — one day before Trump took office.
During the first day of his second administration, Trump signed an executive order directing the Department of Justice not to enforce the law banning TikTok in the U.S. and creating immunity to tech companies like Google or Apple that faced penalties if they continued providing access to TikTok.
Trump extended this pause in enforcement four additional times without any clear legal authority to do so, putting congressional Republicans in the increasingly uncomfortable position of demanding finality for a deal without openly opposing Trump’s handling of the issue.
Officials said that this deal will bring the value of TikTok to the U.S. economy.
“This is a problem that the Biden administration failed to solve,” the senior White House official said. “President Trump has, instead, tackled this issue and is going to solve it.”
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This story was produced as part of a partnership between NOTUS and San José Spotlight.
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